BascCamp Questions

1
Find : choose "address"
Near : type "City, State, Country,
Containing : type the address.

If Birdseye and 3D are the same (I wouldnt know since I've not seen either - due to my video card and etrex not supporting it), you can disable 3D with View->MapViews->3D

Address Searching (or any searching for that matter) has been really weak in BC and MS (IMHO).... I'll often use GoogleEarth to get started, save/export those placemarks, and import them into MS or BC.

Your item #3 is being discussed in this thread: https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?p=103315#post103315

Hope that helps.

1
Find : choose "address"
Near : type "City, State, Country,
Containing : type the address.

Thanks Jacobbax, that seems to work if I put the city and state in the "Near" section, I was not aware you could type anything you wanted in the drop down box since it was pre populated with "center of map" and "center of selection"

3. ... Seems like this is inefficient if you have thousands of Waypoints and Tracks like I do, How can you organize this data? How can you save it or back it up if it is not in a file?

If you go to the File menu you can create new "lists" ... FILE > NEW > Lists in Library.

You will see the new list appear under My Collection and you can name it anything you want. Then you can drag/drop things from the collection into the list. You can put anything you want in any combination into the lists.

So, for example, if you want to have lists of waypoint names separate from route names and track names you could make lists for "Routes", "Waypoints" and "Tracks". Then you could drag all your route names into Routes, all your waypoint names into Waypoints and all your track names into Tracks.

That would give you the basic organization that Mapsource gives you by default and automatically. I only use that to illustrate the concept. You can use the lists feature to organize things any way you wish. For instance, you could make a list for My 2001 Vacation and put your routes into that list as you develop them and then put your track logs into it when you get home from the trip.

There is one very significant thing to be aware of. When you drag/drop something to a list, you are NOT moving the thing itself. The thing -- track, waypoint, route, whatever -- remains physically under My Collection. You are only copying the name of it into the list.

This is important to know because it can be a benefit but it can also be a curse if you forget.

It's a benefit in that you can put any thing -- waypoint, route, track -- into multiple lists if that is useful to you. That way there is only one copy of the actual thing stored. No wasting disk space and no fear of having to keep track of which "copy" is the latest because there is only the one copy in My Collection. The lists are just lists of the names which point back to the thing in the collection.

It is a curse if you forget this principle because if you make two different changes in two different lists, you will not have two different copies. You still only have the one copy and now it has been changed twice. So you have lost the original and can't go back to it. And the second set of changes you made in the second list may have screwed up the first set of changes you made in the first list.

An example may make that easier to understand. Let's say you have a route that you want to experiment with. You make a list and copy the name of the route into the list. To work with the route you decide to select the route name from the list rather than the collection. You make changes.

Now you go look at the route in the collection. It's no longer the original. It has all the changes you just made.

Of course that's obvious when you know that the lists are just lists of names of things in the collections and the things are all still in the collection, not in the lists.

So here's one a bit less obvious. You copy some waypoint names into a list, switch into the list view and mess around with some of them, changing their locations.

If you had any routes in the collection that used those waypoints, those routes will now change the next time you try to use them. Because the waypoints have changed location.

If you change the names of some of the waypoints in the list view, I have no idea what effect that will have on any routes that use those waypoints. It probably won't be good.

Once you discover that you have messed things up, the only way you can go back to the original data is to restore from a backup. But that only works if you had the foresight to make a backup before you started messing about. I have no idea what restoring a backup will do to any data you have added since the backup was done or any changes you have made since the backup that you actually want to keep.

I haven't done any backups so I don't know how much control you have over where it is stored and whether you can give them meaningful names, like "original data before I started planning my summer vacation.bak" or place a comment with similar content into them.

You can also export selected items or the entire collection in a GDB file. I have no idea what happens if you export a GDB file of your entire collection and then import it back in after some experimenting has gone wrong. My guess is that you will now have duplicates of everything in the collection and no way to tell which is the original and which is the version with the changes you no longer want.

I don't have thousands of waypoints but I have hundreds. And I have hundreds of track files of my motorcycle rides. I'm not quite ready to entrust that data to Basecamp. Not until the developers add some better functions to avoid these sorts of problems.

...ken...

If Birdseye and 3D are the same (I wouldnt know since I've not seen either - due to my video card and etrex not supporting it), you can disable 3D with View->MapViews->3D

Address Searching (or any searching for that matter) has been really weak in BC and MS (IMHO).... I'll often use GoogleEarth to get started, save/export those placemarks, and import them into MS or BC.

Your item #3 is being discussed in this thread: https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?p=103315#post103315

Hope that helps.

Thanks PLARKINJR, the Birdseye images are satellite images you can download from Garmin and are similar to what you see in google earth, however I still cant figure how to turn it off as it does not seem to be affected if I turn the 3d views on or off, I usually don't use the 3d view anyway. They also offer Birdseye Topo maps which I am interested in purchasing but will hold off until I can figure out how to turn it off.

Anyone else have any idea how to shut off the Birdseye data?

1. In MapSource I can click on find places, enter an address and MapSource will find the address and let me create a waypoint, how can I do this in Basecamp? It seems Basecamp only finds near your current location on the map. This is inconvenient if you want to make a bunch of way points by using different addresses located thru out the state.

2. How can I turn on\off the Birdseye view in Basecamp? It seems like once I download the images I cant get just the maps to show? What about the Birdseye Topo Maps if I decide to pay for that service?

3. Is seems like BaseCamp is being developed by a bunch of Mac users due to the fact that it is completely different from MapSource. The problem I see with BaseCamp is how it stores waypoints, routes, tracks etc. In Mapsource, you would open a new file, create your waypoints and routes and save the file for future use. In BaseCamp it seems you want everyone to store all of their data in the My Collection area. Seems like this is inefficient if you have thousands of Waypoints and Tracks like I do, How can you organize this data? How can you save it or back it up if it is not in a file?

P.S. Is there a Garmin GPS hardware forum? I have some questions about my Montana 650 that don't seem to be covered in the manual.

1. Has been covered by the helpful forum users.

2. We are planning to have a "Do not display overlays" (that would include Custom Maps(kml) and BirsEye imagery) toggle, just like the Mac version of BaseCamp already has.

For now, use lists. Just like Ken described in his informative post, you can create a list for your BirdsEye, and then you will only see it if you have "My Collection" or the list with the BirdsEye selected. If you have any other list selected, the BirdsEye imagery will not be visible.

3. BaseCamp is not developed by a bunch of Mac users. Speaking for me personally, I don't use Macs, I am a PC guy (you know, the boring, un-cool guy from the commercials). We have two dedicated teams, a Windows and a Mac team, for our desktop application software.

BaseCamp is different from MapSource, but you can't blame just the Mac team for that. ;)

You can back-up data by using the Backup/Restore functionality. This will back-up everything. You can export parts of your data as well by using the Export functionality. Be aware though that exporting will not always get all the information (exporting to gpx for example will not export you BirdsEye data, only waypoints, tracks and routes).

There is no Garmin-maintained hardware forum (in English) that I am aware of. If you have specific question, I'd shoot an email to product support here: http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/home/support/supportcontact.

There is no Garmin-maintained hardware forum (in English) that I am aware of.

There is a hardware forum, mostly about Garmin.
Minor detail...you have to learn dutch first. :(